There are so many explosive revelations here it's hard to know where to start. The bags of cash obviously take the headline but the behaviour of Ministers is the really shocking thing.

Quick thread: 1) There WAS political input into the evidence given and not given - so the government has misled parliament.

Using Freedom of Information I've obtained new data on employments by nationality in each local authority.

It's the only solid data on where migrants have moved to since 2021.

It lets us estimate net migration to each area - & see how it's impacted rental costs & wages. 🧵 The census last ran in England and Wales in 2021, and the traditional source of more up-to-date data, the Labour Force Survey, has collapsed to the point where the ONS warn it can not be relied on to estimate the number of migrants in different places.

Should primary school kids be taught about polyamory, the fetish spectrum & how to get breast binders? Should we tell kids puberty blockers are “reversible” & risk free? Teach 8 year olds about masturbation?
My 2-part piece looks at how sex education in schools went so wrong 🧵 Problem 1: secrecy. You don't have a legal right to see what your kids are being taught, and Labour just voted down the creation of such a right.

Via FOI request I have obtained a large new dataset on the extent to which students at different universities & colleges pay back their student loans.
My new piece looks at the data in light of the revelations in the Sunday Times about fraud in higher education.
A quick thread: The Sunday Times looked at the intersection of "franchised" degrees & the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS).
People may be surprised that in the first 6 months of this government, long after Brexit, over 180,000 people were given settled or pre-settled status under the EUSS:

The map below shows the share of child sex convictions where the offender's ethnicity wasn't recorded. The variation is huge.
It shows why Starmer is wrong to block a national inquiry & rely on local officials to investigate themselves.
And it points to a wider issue...🧵(1/6) You might have thought that following 2020 and George Floyd there would be improvements to statistics on criminal justice and ethnicity.

But my new piece finds the reverse is true - we're becoming less and less likely to record the ethnicity of people convicted of crimes. (2/6)

I have a new piece on the Schools Bill, which will be debated on Wednesday.
It's a truly disastrous Bill which smashes up 30+ years of cross-party progress & reform.
The most frustrating thing is that we can see that the reforms worked: The Bill is an onslaught on the magic formula of freedom plus accountability which has driven improvement.

The effect is abolishing academies in all but name. It's a return to centralisation and micromanagement:

My joint article with NHS consultant @drcarolinej looks at how changing migration is taking us away from our target to eliminate HIV in the UK by 2030.
We argue for a new HIV strategy, including making testing a visa requirement for people from high prevalence countries. The sudden reversal in the declining trend since 2005 is driven by people born outside the UK, notably from high prevalance countries, particularly in Africa:

Absolutely disgraceful attempt to smear the police by Runnymede Trust claiming Kaba death was "racist state violence".

As well as refusing to accept the court verdict they produce a TOTALLY misleading statistic - chosen to whip up conflict (1/8) They quote a figure for deaths "following police contact *since 1990* - which makes it sound like the police are killing loads of people. But the IOPC give some examples of what this category really involves: (2/8)

Today’s Industrial Strategy Green Paper looks pretty similar to the 2017 Industrial Strategy Green Paper & the 2021 Levelling Up White Paper. There's not much new in it.

Thats fine, but it also repeats some Westminster Received Wisdom I think is questionable. Quick 🧵 It claims: “For the eight largest cities outside London combined, the gap between actual and potential productivity could be worth £47 billion.” It includes this chart which you have probably seen before:

My previous thread looked at how we got to having the most expensive power in Europe, and why things will get exponentially worse with Ed Miliband's dash foe a zero carbon grid. This thread looks at the impact on industry and the poorer parts of the UK 🧵 Our framework is all about domestic UK emissions (0.77% world emissions) rather than developing the technologies that can solve the global problem. Our high energy costs have just shunted production from the UK to dirtier countries, and we have imported their products.

The UK is being hit by a wave of industrial closures from Port Talbot to Scunthorpe to Grangemouth where energy policy is a major factor.

I have two longreads out today (link in bio) on what's gone wrong. Quick thread: UK policy is:
1) Reducing domestic emissions,
2) By reducing energy use,
3) By making energy more expensive,
4) Focussing on growing renewables and biofuels,
5) Hoping that other countries will follow in time, but by ‘leading by example’ rather than requiring burden-sharing.

My new piece looks at the hard-to explain variations in train ticket prices in Britain. Why do people travelling similar distances pay massively different amounts?

I have crunched a load of data and the results are baffling.
(1/7) Why is a travelcard from East Grinstead (£82.90) nearly half the price of one from Tunbridge Wells (£145.70), despite commuters travelling similar distances?

Why twice as much per mile from Swindon (£4.03 a mile) compared to Grantham? (£1.99) Or Leicester vs Kings Lynn? (2/7)

I have a new piece up, based on information I've obtained from Freedom of Information requests to HMRC.

1) New data on migrants earnings suggests the median earnings of non-EU migrants under the new system is much lower than previous migrants. The 2 biggest groups are below: 2) The new system made the system more restrictive for EU nationals but much less selective for non-EU nationals. The result has been record immigraiton overall. The number of employments of EU nationals has declined & the number for non-EU nationals has increased:

I have a new (data-heavy!) article on migration & ethnicity which includes:
- The "missing million" difference in migration figures
- Interactive maps for parliamentary constituencies
- An in-depth examination of changes in schools from a WPQ on DFE data

neilobrien.co.uk/p/migration-an… The theme of the piece is that the effect of migration and ethnic change varies massively between different places and people. For some people, immigration hasn’t really changed their world. For others, it has absolutely transformed it.

My new article looks at how changes put in place by Boris Johnson both massively increased overall immigration, and also took us further away from being the 'grammar school of the west' (1/10)

almondtree.substack.com/p/legal-migrat… The UK has shifted from mainly EU migration to mainly non-EU migration (2/10)

There is a lot on this super-timely @ukonward mega polling report - things I thought were interesting included: (1/7)

ukonward.com/wp-content/upl… Why voters left - scandals, being too liberal on migration and (for some) the economy (2/7)

Energy Thread:
1 reason energy package will need an element of direct help is massive variation in energy cost WITHIN different income groups.

Chart below (which is old) shows huge variations, and all these costs will now go up a lot, making absolute variation even bigger (1/7) In the old example above, the median household in the bottom spending decile was spending 14% of post housing income on energy, but the top quartile of same group were spending 23% and top tenth safely over a third. (2/7)

The latest in my series of pieces on challenges for the new PM looks at migration. Quick thread:

Since '97 there’s been unprecedented net migration to the UK. England and Wales’ population rose just 1.2 million from 1971 to 1991, but 7.6 million over the last twenty years (1/13) Many Leave voters assumed Brexit would reduce immigration. But since the referendum gross migration has increased not reduced. (2/13)

*Networks of disinformation: a thread.*

The covid-sceptic campaign group @pcrclaims have deleted all their tweets from before the last couple of days.

They are trying to cover their tracks & look more 'respectable' by deleting stuff like the below (from 16 December). 👇 But they still claim Covid is a "pseudo epidemic".

Their website features Clare Craig saying:

"it is all based around false positive test results, when there is no real disease behind it, and I think that's what we are seeing here." (2/3)

pcrclaims.co.uk/video/Clare-Cr…

Another top covid-sceptic, Dr Clare Craig, has deleted all her tweets from last year.

Unfortunately for her attempts to cover her tracks... Google cached them, so we can take a look at how she’s used her professional qualifications to spread dangerous disinformation.

A thread: On 18 October she claimed in a now-deleted tweet:
“No-one is going to die of it (only with it).Flu diagnoses have been replaced by COVID. This happens when you overtest people dying of respiratory failure until you get the result you are looking for.”

How to handle the Covid pandemic is the most important issue facing MPs right now.

So I wonder why Julia objects to me questioning the claims of her fellow covid-sceptics?

Here's a thread on some of the things *she* has claimed:

https://twitter.com/JuliaHB1/status/1349804968270827520

"Every journalist and MP should be asking the PM & Health Secretary: why are we using a Covid-19 test that has 90% false positives?"

Twitter, 20 September 2020